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Sylvia Abraham’s 17-Card Tarot Spread Explained
Go Beyond the Celtic Cross Tarot Spread
This 17-card tarot spread is from Sylvia Abraham’s How to Read the Tarot: The Keyword System (1997).
I’m sharing the spread because it’s an insightful expansion of the Celtic Cross spread focusing on plans and goals. But if you decide to pick up this book, I advise you to disregard her take on tarot history.
“Tarot images were pictured in the pyramids of ancient Egypt, where many secret schools existed.”
This has been debunked for some time. The Egyptian tarot myth is a fabrication of 18th–and 19th-century occultists seeking to lend antiquity and prestige to their systems.
The false Egyptian connection was popularized by Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Freemason and occult writer, in his work Le Monde Primitif (1781). He claimed (without evidence) that tarot cards were derived from an ancient Egyptian “Book of Thoth,” supposedly containing esoteric wisdom preserved by priests.
The myth was further entrenched by Eliphas Lévi, a French occultist, who tied tarot to the Kabbalah and Hermeticism (a philosophical tradition inspired by Greco-Egyptian texts like the Corpus Hermeticum). Lévi’s writings (e.g., Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1854–56) blended tarot with…
